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Burnley 0 Liverpool 3 (Aug 31 2019)


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Dave Usher

 

Burnley away is supposed to be one of the tricky games. For most teams it is. Hell, for us it usually is. This time though we made it look routine. At no point did this ever look like it was going to be anything other than a comfortable win for us. Even when it was 0-0 it felt like only a matter of time before we scored. 

 

Burnley tried to do what they do. They had the two physical lads up front and they hit it long long to them at every opportunity, but they got nothing out of Virgil and Joel. Those of you who have been reading the Premier League Round Ups over the last 12 months with know I’m a big Ashley Barnes fan. He’s a handful and will cause problems for most defenders, but he never had a sniff in this game and was eventually subbed having done nothing.

 

The easy thing is to give Van Dijk the credit for that but for most of the game Matip was the one dealing with Barnes, while Virg took care of Chris Wood. The two centre backs, ably supported by Fabinho, were the bedrock on which this win was based. They were so dominant they basically just removed Burnley’s teeth. The Clarets were yapping but they had no bite.

 

This was just such an impressive performance, but we’re so good these days that wins like this are almost taken for granted now. They shouldn’t be. It’s not easy to do what we did here. There are some opponents that are tailor made for us and I just expect us to swat them aside. Teams that try to play football against us, especially in their own half, we’ll murder them every time.

 

Burnley though, they present a fairly unique set of problems and we’ve often had trouble dealing with them. This shows just how strong we are now, and I’m not specifically just talking about the players either. A lot goes into wins like this that we fans don’t really see. 

 

The untrained eye just sees a good performance and an impressive win, but without the right gameplan we wouldn’t be seeing that, regardless of how much better our players are than theirs. I feel as though we’re just incredibly well prepared for games these days. We know what the opponent wants to do, and we know how to stop them doing it. It’s rare that we get outmanoeuvred by anyone nowadays.

 

That’s because Klopp and his team of analysts have a plan for each opponent. Obviously I don’t know the specifics of what the plan was here, but you could tell from watching the game and also by what Klopp said afterwards that one of the keys was to make sure we had players around Van Dijk and Matip when they were dealing with the long balls. 

 

If you don’t have that you’re going to have all sorts of problems against Burnley, because even if the defenders win the header, Barnes and Wood are generally backing in and making it difficult for them to get a clean contact. Their midfielders then pick up the bits and they build from there and get plenty of crosses in. It’s simple but effective, and they’re very good at it. Usually.

 

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Not this time though. Virgil just completely dominated Wood all day, and although Matip had the tougher assignment in Barnes, he dealt with him very well too. That was a good battle between those two, with a little bit of needle there too. That’s how Barnes likes it, but Matip was up to the challenge.

 

Fabinho constantly being around his centre backs any time there was a loose ball helped massively too, and between the three of them they just dominated.

 

 

 

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  • dave u pinned this topic

I thought Trent was MOM personally.  He looked like the complete full back.

 

That’s the one thing that’s doing my head in about the Salah argument.  People are saying “oh well all strikers are greedy” and it’s complete rubbish.  Taking shots on when you’re clean in but have that easy pass inside are understandable.  You want forwards to back themselves.  Turning an obvious goal scoring pass down to pull it on to your weaker foot or to put you in a situation where you need to more than just score is being a pig and he needs to cut it out.  In game I was more forgiving of him because I thought he’d played really well again and deserved a couple of attempts himself but watching it back it’s a joke.

 

I’m not of the opinion it’s nothing though.  The players don’t have to love each other but reactions like that can show players aren’t happy and might end up with them leaving.  I’d be fucking sick if Mane wanted out for whatever reason but if it was down to Salah being a greedy cunt I’d be fuming.

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30 minutes ago, The Guest said:

I thought Trent was MOM personally.  He looked like the complete full back.

 

That’s the one thing that’s doing my head in about the Salah argument.  People are saying “oh well all strikers are greedy” and it’s complete rubbish.  Taking shots on when you’re clean in but have that easy pass inside are understandable.  You want forwards to back themselves.  Turning an obvious goal scoring pass down to pull it on to your weaker foot or to put you in a situation where you need to more than just score is being a pig and he needs to cut it out.  In game I was more forgiving of him because I thought he’d played really well again and deserved a couple of attempts himself but watching it back it’s a joke.

 

I’m not of the opinion it’s nothing though.  The players don’t have to love each other but reactions like that can show players aren’t happy and might end up with them leaving.  I’d be fucking sick if Mane wanted out for whatever reason but if it was down to Salah being a greedy cunt I’d be fuming.

 

As great as all of our front three are and even though he scores a shitload of goals, I think Salah would be the easiest to replace. Obviously I hope none of them go anywhere but if one of them had to go...

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Guest Pistonbroke

I said it in the match thread. It was a typical away performance from ourselves in the first half. Stay compact but still play enough football up the other end to create chances. It doesn't matter who you play away from home, you don't want to concede and have to chase the game. We may have got lucky with the TAA goal, but you make your own luck and Burnley had started to defend deeper and their forwards were dropping deeper to try and get involved, mainly because our defence was bossing them. It was a very good defensive performance, plus Adrian pulled off a few important saves when called upon. Matip is the perfect foil for VVD and you can physically see the trust the latter has in his partner. When Gomez plays at CB he is way better than he is at RB, but if you analyse the game VVD gets pulled out of postilion more. We cruised that second half without leaving third gear, Bobby was immense up front and his work rate at getting back to help out in M/F or harry defenders from setting up a move is second to none. It's early in the season but things are starting to gel. This International break has come at the wrong time for us. 

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